Summertime, and the living's not easy. The fish are dying. The taps have run dry. The checkout lines at Food Lion are deep, and the waiting is longer. The pyramids of bottled water evaporate as people frantically load them into carts. The scenes are the same everywhere: Harris Teeter, Kroger, Wal-Mart.

The official North Carolina emergency drought plan has the beauty of simplicity, if not feasibility. If the faucets in Durham, Raleigh or any city in North Carolina start to spit out non-potable water, this is what we'll do: Buy bottled water. You might be able to score Aquafina or Dasani or Le Bleu, filled, ironically, with water from several North Carolina cities. That's if the grocery stores don't run out. They probably will, though.

The odds of this worst-case scenario happening depends on whom you ask, but increasingly, water experts are less sanguine. "It is highly unlikely the reservoirs are going to be full this spring," says Jerad Bales, director of U.S. Geological Survey's North Carolina Water Science Center. "Consider the scenario between now and when it starts heating up in May and June. Stream flows will in all likelihood be low, the ground-water system will almost certainly not have recovered enough to provide sustained base flows, and so with business as usual, the reservoirs will indeed fall rapidly."

Climatologists say there's just a 5 percent to 10 percent chance the reservoirs will recover over the next six months. We don't exactly know how much groundwater is available, but if stream flows are any indicator, there's not much—some North Carolina rivers are experiencing the lowest stream flows in recorded history—and state environmental agencies don't have the regulatory power to monitor who is pulling how much out of the ground.
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Start a man a fire and keep him warm for a day.....start a man on fire and keep him warm for the rest of his life!